Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thoughtWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization; Communication and traffic; Social prediction; Twentieth century -- Forecasts
Such attempts at unofficial soldiering would be entirely in the spirit
in which I believe the New Republic will emerge, but it is in another
line of activity that the growing new consciousness will presently be
much more distinctly apparent. It is increasingly evident that to
organize and control public education is beyond the power of a
democratic government. The meanly equipped and pretentiously conducted
private schools of Great Britain, staffed with ignorant and incapable
young men, exist, on the other hand, to witness that public education is
no matter to be left to merely commercial enterprise working upon
parental ignorance and social prejudice. The necessary condition to the
effective development of the New Republic is a universally accessible,
spacious, and varied educational system working in an atmosphere of
efficient criticism and general intellectual activity. Schools alone are
of no avail, universities are merely dens of the higher cramming, unless
the schoolmasters and schoolmistresses and lecturers are in touch with
and under the light of an abundant, contemporary, and fully adult
intellectuality. At present, in Great Britain at least, the headmasters
entrusted with the education of the bulk of the influential men of the
next decades are conspicuously second-rate men, forced and etiolated
creatures, scholarship boys manured with annotated editions, and brought
up under and protected from all current illumination by the kale-pot of
the Thirty-nine Articles. Many of them are less capable teachers and
even less intelligent men than many Board School teachers. There is,
however, urgent need of an absolutely new type of school--a school that
shall be, at least, so skilfully conducted as to supply the necessary
training in mathematics, dialectics, languages, and drawing, and the
necessary knowledge of science, without either consuming all the leisure
of the boy or destroying his individuality, as it is destroyed by the
ignorant and pretentious blunderers of to-day; and there is an equally
manifest need of a new type of University, something other than a happy
fastness for those precociously brilliant creatures--creatures whose
brilliance is too often the hectic indication of a constitutional
unsoundness of mind--who can "get in" before the portcullis of the
nineteenth birthday falls. These new educational elements may either
grow slowly through the steady and painful pressure of remorseless
facts, or, as the effort to evoke the New Republic becomes more
conscious and deliberate, they may be rapidly brought into being by the
conscious endeavours of capable men. Assuredly they will never be
developed by the wisdom of the governments of the grey. It may be
pointed out that in an individual and disorganized way a growing sense
of such needs is already displayed. Such great business managers as Mr.
Andrew Carnegie, for example, and many other of the wealthy efficients
of the United States of America, are displaying a strong disinclination
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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